


Viral

by iimpavid



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Musician, Cellist, Classical Music, Gen, Hannibal is still a serial killer, M/M, YouTube
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-28 01:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18201527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid
Summary: In which Hannibal Lecter develops a fanaticism toward a particularly reclusive musician.





	Viral

**Author's Note:**

> I should be working on Transmogrification. Instead, I wrote this bit of a thing. Unbeta'd.

The _Adagio_ reached Hannibal first.

Beat-perfect silence fell on those measures where a piano or orchestra should accompany the lonely cello between its plaintive calls down the empty subway tunnel to the service door Hannibal stepped from. The _Pieta_ he had drawn together from a real estate agent above the station melted into irrelevance and longing rose to fill the emptiness in its place. A cold fire of alienation carried in music that ached more with every expansive turn of phrase.

He wasn’t drawn back the way he came, safely away where he intended to go, but to the platform on which the cellist played.

_A moth to a flame._

He had to glance down as he went to reassure himself that his chest hadn’t unfolded itself to reveal something raw and dripping.

No music stand held a score for the cellist, nor was one laid across the tile floor in the flickering fluorescents-- he played from memory. The collar of his blue flannel shirt was damp with sweat. His hair curled from the humidity, growing unrulier with every breath. A pair of glasses was folded atop the closed cello case. He had no coat, no student's backpack, no maintenance uniform; nothing suggesting a reason for his presence in the empty subway at 3 a.m.

He swayed with the instrument in his arms as if his body were a bow drawn by the hand of God.

Hannibal hoisted himself up onto the platform, heedless of the grime the tiles left streaked down the front of his waistcoat and trousers. The small duffel of supplies and fresh meat banged soft against his hip, vinyl warping within it. A sound that was horribly out of place.

The cellist played on in spite of it. In profile, Hannibal could see that his eyes were closed. His expression was caught between ecstatic relief and unyielding agony. He played on and Hannibal was helpless to do more than breathe.

The fourth movement came like an old argument. A one-sided and anxious rehearsal without accompaniment, variations on the same theme that, no matter how pressing or soft, would not be heard by his intended audience. Weariness seeped from every shift of his shoulders down his body and into the floor itself.

The cellist had had this argument before, perhaps he had it every day of his life, and still, he was dismissed.

The concerto deviated again from the score. The cellist hung, tooth and claw, trembling, on its last unresolved phrase, drawing a decrescendo that seemed infinite--

When Hannibal couldn't feel the cello reverberating through the floor or the air or his spine any longer, he exhaled. Tears tracked down his cheeks.

There was divine ordinance in this moment.

A whisper of, "Beautiful," left him on reflex.

The cellist didn’t startle but something about him snapped shut. A retreat that showed in the set of his shoulders and a shift of his feet.

“Folks aren’t supposed to be down here after midnight.”

“And yet here we find ourselves. The acoustics of the tunnels are lovely when they’re empty, don’t you think?”

The cellist smelled of pungent rosin— his hands fidgeted around bow and fretboard more than enough to cast the scent into the air— and beneath that were the stale ethers of cheap aftershave.

He spared Hannibal a glance out of the corner of his eye. Hannibal wondered what he saw.

“They won’t be much longer; this one’s due for maintenance in twenty minutes,” then, as if cued, there came faint noises of workmen making their way down the tunnel to them, “or less.”

They would find Hannibal’s _Pieta_ soon, very soon, but he couldn’t leave just yet. “You come here to play often.”

The cellist said nothing but bent to retrieve his glasses and begin to stow his instrument.

“Do you ever perform elsewhere?”

“No.” 

“Why not?”

“Not all of us are exhibitionists.”

“What is your name?”

The cellist’s laugh was bitter, disappointed. “Here I thought you were smarter than that.”

Hannibal watched him leave. watched him lever first himself on limber legs over the bank of turnstiles, then reaching back for the cello, flannel shirt drawing tight over his back and biceps. he took the stairs two at a time even with the case in tow.

The ghost of the concerto ebbed and flowed in his absence.

Hannibal drifted on the current and found himself home by sunrise without a clear memory of how he came to be there.

__

" _Dr. Lecter!_ _Where_ have you been? Work can’t possibly be keeping you too busy to come to the opera.”

There were no easy search terms to apply to Google or the Pratt Library’s database of newspapers and periodicals. Hannibal was left with no choice but to pick the brains of real people.

Hannibal returned Effie Mack’s glowing smile. “It doesn’t but I do enjoy conducting research when I’m not seeing patients; it’s the only way to stay sharp. I won’t assume that the firing of sodium gates in the neurons of newts would amuse... but I suppose you _would_ be interested to know that I had the most fascinating encounter at Owings-Mills last week.”

“Oh, do tell,” she said, taking a sip of her champagne. The octogenarian seemed more interested in it than the conversation but she was an incorrigible gossip and Hannibal needed, desperately, to know what she knew.

“I’m almost afraid you wouldn’t believe me if I did.”

“Unless you claim you’ve seen the governor and his paramour necking in the family restroom, I think I’ll find anything plausible.”

They shared a laugh. The reality of the tabloid article had been much more benign: a business student and his artist boyfriend reunited after some months and too impatient for the train home. An uncanny resemblance. Nothing more.

“My tall tale doesn’t top that but I think I might have seen a ghost.”

“Now you have my attention, young man, don’t stop there.”

“I was passing by the station after a late night in the office— I enjoy walking in the small hours, it clears my head— and I heard a cello from below playing Elgar’s infamous concerto in e minor. at first I thought it might be some recording, put on at volume by a janitor of exquisite taste, but it deviated from the original score.”

“ _Dr. Lecter,_ don’t tell me you broke into a subway station to investigate.”

“I won’t say a word on how I found myself on the platform but what I saw once I was there, or rather what I heard, was divine. and I mean that truly, as if God Himself guided the hands of the musician playing there amid the grime and leeching fluorescent lights—” he caught himself, collected his residual wonder back into his chest where it belonged, then continued— “I have never heard a cellist of such skill anywhere in the world. He left immediately after I complimented his work and refused to give me a name.”

Effie’s eyes sparkled in a way that had little to do with her inebriation. “Oh, he’s not a ghost but you’re not the first person I know to think that.”

“You know of him? Who is he?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. he’s never given anyone his name as far as I know but he plays a few places regularly enough, almost always in the dead of night. Mr. Nahng has stumbled on him three times now, by the greenhouse.”

“Is that so?”

She nodded. “My granddaughter’s on this forum on the Internet, you see, where some people have taken to calling him _The Chesapeake Cellist_ — a couple people claim they’ve run into him in the woods some nights, but that’s can’t be true, what would take them out there to find him? — I hear he’s friendlier than his namesake. Or at least that he’s got fewer violent tendencies.”

“A relief for us all, certainly, although it would be quite the scoop if the Chesapeake Ripper and the Chesapeake Cellist were one in the same.”

Effie threw back her head and laughed.

__

The Chesapeake Cellist had been playing across the eastern seaboard for years without a discernible pattern.

The earliest-documented performance took place on August 29th, 2003 on a West Virginia street corner, in broad daylight. He played the same locale for months until a local reporter finally approached him, begging an interview; the resultant article had been bitterly disappointed and accompanied only by a photo the cellist, mostly-obscured in the midday sun, his face turned away from the camera. His hands were a blur of movement. A smudge of a border collie laid at his feet.

The Cellist grew skittish after that, never playing any one venue twice in a row or at a consistent hour. Nor was he ever seen with the same dog again but other hounds did make appearances.

In another subway, Manhattan this time, on Christmas Eve 2007: a highly-pixelated video with sound quality that crackled too loudly for music to be discerned. The Cellist was ignored by the passersby, hundreds of them. Near the end of a video, a child wrenched itself away from its parent and ran to stand and watch the Cellist play in unabashed awe.

A better-quality recording in 2011: the video alternated between black screen and an extreme close up of a person’s palm then sometimes a blur of shoes on asphalt in a circle of a streetlight— they were stood still, pretending to text while the video recorded and the Cellist played. Hannibal recognized the strains of Rameau’s _Les Sauvages,_  it's tightly-contained rage incandescent when played on cello rather than harpsichord.

The video with the best angles of the Cellist’s face emerged from Boston in April 2012. It had a short dialogue as the camera followed him up the busy street:

“Hey what do you do with your tips?”

“Nothing.”

“You gotta literal bucket of cash there, man, you can’t tell me you’re gonna just stuff it in a mattress.”

He glanced back over his shoulder, “Nope,” tired blue eyes dancing with amusement. He turned abruptly up an alley and left the paint bucket, the coins and bills rattling in the bottom of it, beside a sleeping vagrant.

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re just gonna leave that with some stranger? You musta got what? $200 in the last _hour_?”

“$250.”

“You’re just gonna give up the bucket, too, like what even--”

“I’ve got more.”

“Who are you, man?”

“Nobody. You can stop filming now.”

The cellist forbade recording thereafter. There were a smattering of videos taken where, seconds after the recording began, the cellist froze-- stock still like a stag scenting danger-- then made his way about packing up and leaving, violently efficient in his irritation, without once turning toward the camera.

Those who followed the Chesapeake Cellist’s work were few. After all, no studio recordings existed for distribution and his live performances were done without the trappings and arrogance of most street performers seeking viral fame.

Some speculated he might be a member of _Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique,_ which toured more than a few of the cities he could be found in but had been across the globe from others. Others posited that he was indeed a spirit, restless with some unknowable heartbreak and risen from the depths of the sea. More serious investigators, and there were a few, had tracked down records of a cellist in Charleston, North Carolina. A young man who had submitted a single headshot with an application and audition for the Charleston Symphony Orchestra.

The application had been rejected out of hand: he had not arrived in time for his audition. The man in the photograph was painfully young, a student _then,_ most certainly. He didn’t look into the camera but cast his eyes somewhere beyond it in an accusatory glare.

Comments below ranged from credulous to annoyed and annoying:

 

> “that’s it!!! that’s him!!!”
> 
> “this guy doesn’t even exist”
> 
> “is that a stock photo? can you teach me to remove watermarks?”
> 
> “he looks different with a beard but I’m pretty sure that’s the same guy I heard in Atlanta”
> 
> “too young”
> 
> “dunno what you guys are talking about the guy I saw last year looked exactly like this— he hasn’t aged a day”
> 
> “time traveling vampires are among us”
> 
> “wtf”
> 
> “keanu reeves duh”

The thread devolved only further from there. Hannibal read through the application materials again and seethed; the name had been covered on each scanned page with a single purple sticky note. A deliberate obfuscation on the part of the original poster. “Obviously he doesn’t want his personal info getting out there,” they’d written in the caption as if they felt not a shred of cognitive dissonance.

Hannibal might have been grateful for the work of these amateur sleuths had it led him anywhere near his target. The cellist defied the hunt entirely. Traces of him were all cold and isolated from each other. Stories unsupported by evidence.

Of course, the others didn’t have Hannibal’s patience and tenacity.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no present plans for constructing an actual story from this... yet. But I’m open to suggestions, collaborations, delighted compliments, etc etc etc


End file.
